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Banned
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ace...I'll reply to your post in detail when I have time to focus, over the weekend....meanwhile, with the major stock market indexes at multi day, new record highs, up until ten days ago...how could this come out, today?
Quote:
Reuters
Caterpillar net misses expectations
Friday October 19, 9:39 am ET
By James B. Kelleher
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Caterpillar Inc, the world's top maker of earth-moving equipment, diesel engines and gas turbines, posted disappointing quarterly earnings on Friday and cut its full-year profit forecast, sending its shares down nearly 4 percent.
The company said several key U.S. industries it serves, including trucking and nonmetal mining, are "in recession," and <h3>its machinery sales to nonresidential builders are declining as fast as sales to the residential building industry, which it said was in "severe recession."......</h3>
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....and......the US dollarette:
<img src="http://futures.tradingcharts.com/charts/USM.GIF">
Chart: http://futures.tradingcharts.com/chart/US/M
...buy and store canned tuna and veggies....a shotgun and ammo.....there is nothing to glue our American civilixation together....now that the Fed has served up the dollar for devaluation in exchange for debt mitigation and major Wall Street firms solvency......and their effort will fail......so will the dollar.....China and OPEC are still stuffed with these dollarettes.....they'll all sell them at once.....to whom?
Quote:
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Caterpillar Inc (CAT.N: Quote, Profile, Research), which makes diesel engines that power the biggest trucks on the highway, said on Friday the North American trucking market is going through a downturn that may be the worst in more than 50 years.
Speaking on a conference call to discuss its third-quarter results, Doug Oberhelman, Caterpillar group president with responsibility for engines, said the market for those engines in North America was the softest he has seen in his career.
"We're experiencing the worst market ... probably since World War II," Oberhelman said.......
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...and the market just closed....DJIA (Dow 30) down 369. Nasdaq 2000, down 74, S&P 500 down 39.69........
...silver is still relatively cheap, compared to gold....silver will ramp.....buy silver, pre-1965 US coins at tulving.com ........they are easy to carry, and one of those old silver dimes will be worth $4.00. as it was in 1980 when silver reached $50/oz
<h3>....All the talking heads on CNBS have been wrong.....all the ANALysts....wrong......and FAUX launched a new financial TV channel.....a competitor of CNBS....this week.....at the top......this is your grandfathers 75 year "event"....redux.....Thank you, Mr, President:</h3>
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http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea.../20010821.html
Remarks by the President on the Budget
... that we have fully funded and will be able to fully fund our nation's priorities, that we've got enough money to preserve and protect Social Security,
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLI...uri/index.html
Bush pledges protection for Medicare, Social Security
August 22, 2001 Posted: 11:54 AM EDT (1554 GMT)
By Major Garrett
CNN White House Bureau
INDEPENDENCE, Missouri (CNN) -- President Bush visited Democratic icon Harry Truman's hometown Tuesday to tout his plans for preserving Social Security and Medicare, saying both programs would be protected under his budget, even as Democrats planned to greet him with TV ads accusing him of "raiding" the programs.
Bush, speaking in a packed high school auditorium, said new budget numbers to be released by his administration Wednesday "will show in plain terms that we have fully funded and will be able to fully fund our nation's priorities."
The numbers, Bush said, will illustrate "that we've got enough money to preserve and protect Social Security, that we'll pay down over $100 billion of public debt, that Medicare -- all Medicare, every dime that comes into Medicare, will be spent on Medicare. ....
....Bush made his comments at Harry S. Truman High School, with a large contingent on retirees on hand to hear his speech, which touched on a variety of his priorities but ended with a focus on the two retirement programs.
The DNC ads accuse Bush of jeopardizing the long-term health of Social Security and Medicare. Their central allegation is that federal budget surpluses have shrunk from a projected $281 billion in February of this year to $158 billion in August. Democrats argue this brings the budget close to spending excess Social Security revenue, something Bush has vowed never to do.
"The Bush budget violates one of Harry Truman's basic principles -- protecting seniors," the ad says.
In his speech, though, Bush said his fiscal policies have helped protect the surplus despite the year-long economic slowdown. Even though the budget surplus has shrunk, Bush noted that it remains large when compared to other years.
"Despite the year-long trend….the federal budget will have the second largest surplus in history. In part, because this administration took immediate action to address the downturn. We took exactly the right action, at the right time, by pushing the largest tax cut in a generation," Bush said.
"You will hear people say that tax relief is gonna make it hard to meet the budget. But reality is tax relief is important to make sure our economy grows," he said. "I believe there are some who resent tax relief because they wanted more of your money in Washington, D.C. It's a fundamental philosophical difference."
But the Democrats say the smaller surplus means Washington is spending funds Republicans had vowed to set aside for all Medicare expenses. Coverage of Social Security tax revenue and Medicare operating expenses would require a surplus of roughly $207 billion, Democrats say.
Bush said Congress, though, must do its part to protect the nation's budget outlook. "The biggest threat to our recovery is for the Congress to overspend."
The Republican National Committee has dismissed the Democratic ad campaign.
"It's another attempt by the Democrats to use special interest money to attack the president," said Trent Duffy, spokesman for the RNC. "It has not worked before, and it won't work now."
CNN's Manuel Perez-Rivas contributed to this report.
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Quote:
http://slate.com/id/2093707/
The Unlocked BoxHow Bush is plundering Social Security to close the deficit.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Friday, Jan. 9, 2004, at 1:51 PM ET
The International Monetary Fund, which usually frets about runaway fiscal policies in developing countries, yesterday released <a href="http://www.imf.org/external/Pubs/NFT/Op/227/index.htm">a report</a> that warned of the dangers to the global economy posed by the United States' lack of spending discipline, its reliance on foreign creditors, and its failure to plan adequately for future government liabilities.
Earlier this week, even as he <a href="http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/js1087.htm">called for</a> making the Bush tax cuts permanent, Treasury Secretary John Snow pooh-poohed the deficit problem and insisted the government has a plan to improve matters:
<i>"Our fiscal situation remains a matter of concern. With major expenditures to protect our nation's homeland security and fight the war on terror, coupled with a recovering economy, we still face a deficit in the $500 billion range for the current fiscal year—larger than anyone wants. But that size deficit, at roughly 4.5% of GDP (compared with a modern peak of 6% during the 80s), is not historically out of range; and it is entirely manageable, if we continue the president's strong pro-growth economic policies and sound fiscal restraint. Indeed, with adoption of the President's policies, our projections show a solid path toward cutting the deficit in half, toward a size that is below 2% of GDP, within the next five years.
The genial treasury secretary, a former deficit hawk, seems literally incapable of speaking truthfully about the deficit. click to show (The same holds for <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/nec/">National Economic Council Chairman Stephen Friedman.</a>) In fact, if we adopt the president's policies—which include a host of new tax cuts and massive new spending programs—the deficit won't fall 50 percent in the next five years."</i><p> It will grow substantially. And if President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress weren't already quietly using every penny of the massive and growing Social Security surplus to cover operating expenses—and planning to continue this habit—the deficits would be even larger.
Back in 1983, as part of a deal to save Social Security from impending demographic doom, Congress enacted <a href="http://www.ssa.gov/history/1983amend.html">legislation</a> to essentially increase payroll taxes and reduce benefits. As a result, the government began to collect more Social Security payroll taxes than it paid out to beneficiaries each year. The theory was that the government would use these surpluses to pay down the national debt. That way, when baby boomers retire—and comparatively more people are collecting benefits while comparatively fewer people are working—the government would be in a better position to borrow the necessary funds to provide the promised benefits.
So much for theory. The reality? For the first 15 years, every penny of the surplus was spent, first by Republican presidents and then by a Democratic president. According to figures provided by <a href="http://www.crfb.org/">the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget</a>, the surpluses were relatively insignificant for much of this period. Between 1983 and 2001 a total of $667 billion in excess Social Security payroll taxes was spent—about $35 billion per year. It was only in fiscal 1999 and 2000, when the government ran so-called on-budget surpluses, that excess Social Security funds were actually used to retire debt.
In the 2000 campaign, Vice President Al Gore said we should sequester the Social Security surpluses in a "lockbox" to prevent appropriators from spending them. Bush agreed in principle. But that commitment went out the window soon after the inauguration. In his first three budgets, Bush (who had the good fortune to take office at a time when the surpluses were growing rapidly) and Congress used $480 billion in excess Social Security payroll taxes to fund basic government operations—about $160 billion per year!
By so doing, Washington spenders have masked the size of the deficit. For Fiscal 2004—which began in October 2003—if you factor out the $164 billion Social Security surplus, the on-budget deficit will be at least $639 billion, rather close to the modern peak of 6 percent of GDP. And according to its own <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/summarytables.html#table8">projections</a> (the bottom line of Table 8 represents the Social Security surplus), the administration plans to spend an additional $990 billion in such funds between now and 2008. That year, according to the Office of Management and Budget's projections, the on-budget deficit will be about $464 billion. Only by using that year's $238 billion Social Security surplus does the administration arrive at a total, unified deficit of $226 billion. And the ultimate on-budget deficit will almost certainly be worse. OMB has proven in the past few years that its projections can't be trusted.
The accounting for Social Security surpluses has always been dishonest. But in the past few years, the Bush administration has made this shady accounting a central pillar of its fiscal strategy. The unprecedented reliance on these funds hides the failure of the administration to ensure that there is some reasonable correlation between the resources it has at its disposal and the spending commitments it makes. Bush & Co. have redesigned the tax system so that collections of the progressive taxes that are supposed to fund government operations—like individual income taxes—have plummeted. Instead, with each passing year we rely for our current needs more on the regressive payroll taxes that are supposed to fund our collective retirement.
The persistence of the administration and its credulous allies in eliding these facts is flabbergasting. Of course, for the Bush administration to give an honest accounting of the deficits, and of the role that Social Security surpluses play in keeping them down, would be to admit the fundamental bankruptcy—no pun intended—of its adventuresome fiscal experiment. |
Last edited by host; 10-19-2007 at 12:13 PM..
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